In recent years, Internet has been widely employed worldwide. In particular, the World Wide Web (WWW) of Internet can provide voice, graphics, and multimedia services in addition to e-mail transmission and receiving. Hence, people can access a variety of information from WWW. Further, many people take log-on the Internet as a daily work. For accommodating such trend, a variety of high speed network devices have been provided by network equipment manufacturers. Such devices comprise cable modem, asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) modem, etc. Moreover, various associated network peripherals are provided by network equipment manufacturers for enhancing the functionality of network. Such peripherals comprise voice over IP device (VoIP), etc. User can employ VoIP to communicate with a remote user over the Internet so as to greatly reduce long distance or international telecommunication charge.
Conventionally, a UTP (Unshielded Twisted Pair) based network architecture is selected from a variety of existing network architectures and is widely employed in a community network system as shown in FIG. 1. Each Ethernet adapter 30 at user comprises an ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line) communication interface (not shown) and a router control circuit (not shown). Ethernet adapter 30 is electrically coupled to an Ethernet equipment (not shown) in central office (or network system communication provider) 34 through router control circuit, UTP based telephone line 31, Ethernet switch 32 of central office 34 installed in a community, and optical fiber 33. The Ethernet equipment is in turn coupled to the Internet 35 through optical fiber 33. Hence, packets from Ethernet adapters 30 can be transmitted to the Internet 35. Alternatively, packets from the Internet 35 can be received by Ethernet adapters 30. In above network architecture, for example, packets originated from central office 34 are transmitted to each of a certain number of users in community through the high speed optical fiber 33, Ethernet switch 32, and an existing telephone line 31 of each user. As a result, the data transmission of each user is much improved in terms of speed.
In the above mentioned FTTH (Fiber To The Home) or ETTH (Ethernet To The Home) application, there is a long distance between Ethernet switch 32 and central office 34. Hence, network is utilized to perform the same. Further, it is impossible to perform a real tim online maintenance and management on Ethernet switch 32 by central office 34 because a SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocel) being employed by most network management systems only has limited application. When the system fails, a loopback test is typically conducted to detect which component is malfunctioned. During the loopback test, network management system installed in central office 34 is responsible to issue at least one Ping instruction. Ethernet switch 32 then may reply to the Ping instruction as it receives the same. Hence, network management system can determine that Ethernet switch 32 fails if there is no reply of the Ping instruction from ethernet switch 32 within a predetermined period of time. In other words, the only technique employed by network management system is to issue a Ping instruction to Ethernet switch 32 for determining whether there is a malfunction from the presence of reply. As to the special problem such as line disconnection, or software in Ethernet switch 32 not normally running, or any other, there is no information about that. Moreover, after network management system has issued a Ping instruction, a good reply means that both hardware and associated software operate normally. Otherwise, it is impossible of obtaining a good reply as well as correctly determining the nature of the fail. For solving the problem, it is typical to assign employees to the site of Ethernet switch 32 to perform a manual maintenance and management. It is disadvantageous because maintenance and management is poor, cost is high, and communication quality is degraded. Thus, a need for improvement exists.